The Killing Circle

of his steps. I should start running now. A sudden break for it that might steal the few yards needed to give me a chance. But I’m suddenly too tired.

I round the corner on to the darker stretch of Euclid, straight to the patch of exposed tree roots that is my front yard. When I finally turn it’s with the resignation of prey that cannot retreat any further.

“Got some news,” Ramsay says, wearing a quarter-grin.

“You couldn’t use the phone?”

“People say I’m better in person.”

“Better at what?”

He takes a step forward. The streetlight can’t reach him where he stands, so that all I can see are flashes of teeth.

“Len Innes has been reported missing.”

“Missing? How?”

“That’s the point with missing. You don’t know how.”

“Christ.”

“When was the last time you spoke with him?”

“I don’t know. A while ago.”

“And what was the substance of your conversation?”

“Nothing much.”

“Just a friendly chat then?”

“You think I killed Len?”

“I thought he was only missing.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Sure you do.”

“Is this fun for you? This droll, Columbo, catandmouse bullshit?”

“Everyone’s a critic.”

“Not everyone. I’m out of the critic business.”

“Idle hands.”

“Idle would be nice. But you keep coming around accusing me of murdering people. It’s the kind of thing that can get in the way of a fellow’s retirement plans.”

“Here’s some news: I don’t give a fuck about your retirement plans.”

“I don’t think you believe I’m a killer, either.”

“You might be wrong there.”

“So arrest me. Do something. If not, get off my property.”

Something changes in Detective Ramsay’s face. Not in his expression—which remains jawclenched, bemused—but in his face. The skin pulled taut over the bone, showing the animalthing beneath. Here is a creature free from the encumbrances of loyalty, of empathy, of seeing the human race as an enterprise that stands a chance over the long haul. All of which likely makes him a more than capable investigator of man’s darkest actions. It may also enable him to carry out those actions himself.

“How’s Sam?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your son. How is he?”

“Fine.”

“Daddy’s out pretty late to leave a little guy like that on his own.”

“You know he’s not inside.”

“I do?”

“Sam’s safe.”

“You sure? Because it’s getting less and less safe everywhere you go.”

I turn away, expecting him to launch a final remark my way, but I unlock the front door, step inside and close it behind me without another word from him.

Not that he’s gone.

I peek out the window without turning on the lights. Ramsay stands under the dark bough of the front yard’s maple. Unmoving as a statue and yet somehow undeniably alive, the air around him passing in and out of his lungs as though to be claimed as much as breathed. He belongs to the night world. The widening chasm between what you know is there and what can’t be.

Ivan belongs to the night world too. And it is the next night that I see him in the food court of the Eaton Centre, making his way toward the entrance to the Dundas subway. All this is odd, as I hate malls, and hate mall food even more. I’m actually thinking this—It’s odd that I’m here—when Ivan strolls by my table. Which is odder still, seeing as he’s dead.

When I saw Conrad White thumbing through The Sandman in a bookstore when he was also among the no-longer-with-us, it gave me a chill. But as I watch Ivan lope through the crowd of tourists and locals like me with nowhere better to go, I’m instantly, paralytically afraid. It’s because he’s here for a purpose, and it’s clear that I’m not going to like it. That’s what Ivan tells me in his startling, unphantomly realness, the way he looks back over his shoulder at me, beckoning with hollow drill-holes for eyes. He’s here to show me something.

And I follow him. Jumping the queue at the subway ticket booth, pushing through with understandable fuck yous fired at my back. Ivan may be dead, but he moves quicker than I ever saw him move in life. Sliding past the others making their way below. Scampering on to the escalator so that I have to take the stairs down two at a time to have a hope of catching him.

Once on the platform, I’m sure I’ve lost him. That is, I’m sure he wasn’t there to begin with. This is what I try to tell myself: you haven’t been sleeping, you’re under stress, you’re seeing things.

Ivan steps forward from the crowd at the far end of the platform as the train roars into the station. I start pushing my way toward him even as I expect this moment to play out as his last seconds of life played, with him jumping on to the tracks before the driver has a chance to lock the brakes.

But he doesn’t jump. He looks my way.

His eyes find me instantly over the heads and ballcaps and turbans. An expression of the same sort he wore to all the circle meetings, but now somehow intensified. It lets me see what’s inside him, what may have been inside him all along. Longing. For someone to talk to. To be forgiven.

The train’s doors open. All of us except Ivan step aside to let the passengers off, and they move around the space he takes. It lets him be the first one on. Then the crowd follows him, squeezing in shoulder to shoulder through doors not quite wide enough to accommodate them. By the time I am freed from Ivan’s stare I’m left alone on the platform, the doors already closing. I make a dash to get on—a knocking at the glass that earns sneers from within—but I’m too late.

I step back to see if I can spot Ivan inside. And there he is, sitting face out in a window seat, finding me with a jealous glare. Except now he’s not alone.

Conrad White sits across from him, knee to knee. Petra behind them. Evelyn a couple seats back. All the Kensington Circle’s dead with their noses to the windows. Ovals of malice mixed with the indifferent passengers.

In the next second, as the train releases its brakes and picks up speed, their faces flatten and blur. The car they sit in swallowed into the tunnel’s mouth. The faces of the Kensington Circle along with those of the living commuters, good luck awaiters, furious strivers.

If I didn’t know who was who, I might say all of them were dead.